Published in The Free Press Journal: Weekend on October 6, 2013.
Read the article
here.
Courtesy: Flipkart.com
With Inputs by Arnesh Ghose
Not too far from their house, there were two ponds
set beside each other. Behind the ponds was a lowland, which never had
much significance to the siblings Udayan and Subhash. It was just something you
cross on your way to Tolly Club. It was in the floodwater of this lowland,
submerged among the hyacinths, that Udayan now lay crouched, hiding from the
policemen on the prowl.
The doctor had said that even if you didn’t
breathe, you would still survive for about six minutes. Udayan could feel the breath
he was holding going solid. But he was prepared to slug it out. There was only
one small issue. His wife and his parents were held at gunpoint by a horde of
policemen. Those khaki-clad symbols of institutional brutality. And they were
training their guns at his father.
At this height of this nail-biting mise-en-scéne
you see breathlessly building up, you hear a conch shell blowing. The sounds
are carried in from another neighbourhood. Someone, somewhere, oblivious of the
tumult barely a stone’s throw away, is making an offering at a temple. Within
moments, you are whisked back to Udayan. The police take their aim. The clean
shots fired are followed by the sound of crows, coarsely calling, scattering.
It is such contrasts that run naked throughout
Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel ‘The Lowland’, when the dignity of a conch-shell is
juxtaposed against the raw call of crows’ feast. Their presence make the events
jump through the pages so that you see and hear the silence, now suffocating,
so vivid.
Her previous works have concentrated on themes of
nostalgia, the constant feeling of being ‘Nixon’s guests’ no matter how many
years you live in the country; themes that often overlap. The American writer
of Indian descent is comfortable with her middle-class characters and creating
their solitude. You will find them everywhere – in the supermarket aisle
comparing the price labels, on the beach ready to freeze the moment in their
Kodak film rolls, laying out mats in the garden and throwing a Frisbee. They
are not loud. They don’t believe in excesses. You won’t find them chilling at
old Gatsby’s parties. They are a type – rooted in their culture, probably
feeling more at ease striking up a conversation with the brown taxi driver than
their white work colleagues.
Except for the rare moments like the one above, it
is the mind is where the action lies.
So we have the Mitras- Subhash and Udayan,
residents of Tollygunge in Calcutta. Born 15 months apart, they share a bond
that extends all the way to America when Subhash decides to go there for higher
studies. By then, Udayan has been deeply influenced by the Maoist movement. He
takes up a teaching job at the university. When in shadows, he is one of the
foot soldiers of the movement, attending Sanyal’s fiery speeches and going down
to that little shop on the corner to buy banned literature. He has found love
and a wife in Gauri, a philosophy student at the university.
As the air thickens with the red of the flags, a
darker hue carpets the streets. Blood flows, revolutionaries and law-makers
alike. With time, among them is Udayan’s. Subhash is appalled by the
white-saree Gauri has been reduced to, ‘...so that she resembled other widows
in her family. Women three times her age’. Even though she is now pregnant,
Subhash unable to stifle a forbidden affection that rises in him. He offers to
take her to America to start life anew.
Once in Rhode Island, one might think that Lahiri
enters the familiar terrain. I expected another Ashima in Gauri, intimidated by
everything around her before slowly building a cosy life as in The Namesake.
But Gauri is a firebrand. She doesn’t flinch while raising her hand in the
class nor is there any stutter in her speech. Her only weakness is her past.
Udayan’s ghost looms large over the novel. And with that undercurrent, Lahiri
creates a vast, deeply intimate drama spanning from the time of Nehru’s
midnight speech to Obama bumper stickers.
‘The Lowland’ unfurls like a reel with Lahiri
creating imagery that is as visible as it is audible. Sample her rains: the
‘avalanche of gravel on the thin, membrane like roof,’ the drops falling from
the leaves ‘like a scattered applause’ while the rains recede, deliciously
plugged in moments after Subhash makes love. Her novels were hardly political
but Lahiri deftly manages the broader canvas with elegance, never sterilizing
it. In one sentence, she captures all her characters’ conflicts: ‘The future
haunted, but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.’
That Lahiri’s book would create waves all the way
from the Pacific was a given. Ever since her Pulitzer-marked debut, Lahiri’s
reputation preceded her work. Thus whether or not it had made it to the Booker
Prize shortlist, The Lowland took birth in a world where it would go on to be
the new book to read and be snooty about. So don’t be surprised to hear about
Fox Studios coughing up a bomb to buy the movie rights of The Lowland. If made
with as much love as The Namesake, there are lots of olive branches to be seen
on the poster.
